RSS

Tag: windows xp

At the same time, on the Extended Support Release channel, we released Firefox ESR 60.2 and stopped supporting Firefox ESR 52: the final version of Firefox with Windows XP support.

Now, we don’t publish all-channel user proportions grouped by operating system, but as part of the Firefox Public Data Reportwe do have data from the release channel back before we switched our XP users to the ESR channel. At the end of February 2016, XP users made up 12% of release Firefox. By the end of February 2017, XP users made up 8% of release Firefox.

If this trend continued without much change after we switched XP users to ESR, XP Firefox users would presently amount to about 2% of release users.

That’s millions of users we kept safe on the Internet despite running a nearly-17-year-old operating system whose last patch was over 4 years ago. That’s a year and a half of extra support for users who probably don’t feel they have much ability to protect themselves online.

It required effort, and it required devoting resources to supporting XP well after Microsoft stopped doing so. It meant we couldn’t do other things, since we were busy with XP.

I think we did a good thing for these users. I think we did the right thing for these users. And now we’re wishing these users the very best of luck.

…and that they please oh please upgrade so we can go on protecting them into the future.

Firefox users who are on Windows XP now have until August 28, 2018 to upgrade their machines. In the grand Internet tradition I will explore this by pretending someone is asking me questions.

Why?

The last Firefox release supporting Windows XP is Firefox ESR 52. Previously Firefox ESR 52 was set to end-of-life on or around May of 2018 after the next ESR, Firefox ESR 59, had been released and stabilized. Now, with an email to the Enterprise, Dev Platform, Firefox Dev, and Mobile Firefox Dev mailing lists, :Sylvestre has announced that the next ESR will be Firefox ESR 60, which extends the Firefox ESR 52 end-of-life to August 28, 2018.

No, not “Why did it change,” Why should anyone still care about Windows XP? Hasn’t it been out-of-service for a decade or something?

But as to why we should care… well, Windows XP is still a large-ish portion of the Firefox user base. I don’t have public numbers in front of me, but you can see the effect the Windows XP Firefox population numbers had on the Firefox Hardware Report when we diverted them to ESR this past March. At that time they were nearly 8.5% of all Firefox users. That was more than all versions of Mac Firefox users.

Also, it’s possible that these users may be some of the most vulnerable of the Internet’s users. They deserve our thought.

Oh, okay, fine. If they matter so much, why aren’t we supporting them forever?

As you can see from the same Firefox Hardware Report, the number of Windows XP Firefox users was in steady decline. At some point our desire and capability to support this population of users can no longer match up with our desire to ship the best experience to the most users.

Given the slope of the decline in the weeks leading up to when we migrated Windows XP Firefox users to Firefox ESR, we ought to be getting pretty close to zero. We hate to remove support from any users, but there was a real cost to supporting Windows XP.

For instance, the time between the ESR branch being cut and the first Windows XP-breaking change was a mere six days. And it wasn’t on purpose, we were just fixing something somewhere in Gecko in a way that Windows XP didn’t like.

So who are we going to drop support for next?

I don’t know of any plans to drop support for any Operating Systems in the near future. I expect we’ll drop support for older compilers in our usual manner, but not OSs.

That pretty much sums it up.

If you have any questions about Firefox ESR 60, please check out the Firefox ESR FAQ.

With the release of Firefox 52 to all users worldwide, we now have the final Windows XP-supported Firefox release out the door.

This isn’t to say that support is done. As I’ve mentioned before, Windows XP users will be transitioned to the ESR update channel where they’ll continue to receive security updates for the next year or so.

And I don’t expect this to be the end of me having to blog about weird clients that are inexplicably on Windows XP.

However, this does take care of one of the longest-standing data questions I’ve looked at on this blog and in my career at Mozilla. So I feel that it’s worth taking a moment to mark the occasion.

Submissions from Aurora (what the Firefox Developer Edition branch is called internally) 51 tailed of when Aurora 52 was released in exactly the way we’ve come to expect. Aurora 52 had a jump mid-December when we switched to using “main” pings instead of “saved-session” pings to run our aggregates, but otherwise everything’s fine heading into the end of the year.

But then there’s Aurora 51 rising from the dead in late December. Some sort of weird re-adoption update problem? But where are all those users coming from? Or are they actually users? These graphs only plot ping volumes.

( Quick refresher: we get anonymous usage data from Firefox users via “pings”: packets of data that are sent at irregular intervals. A single user can send many pings per day, though more than 25 in a day is a pretty darn chatty. )

At this point I filed a bug. It appeared as though, somehow, we were getting new users running Aurora 51 build 20161014.

:mhowell popped the build onto a Windows machine and confirmed that it was updating fine for him. Anyone running that build ought not to be running it for long as they’d update within a couple of hours.

At this point we’d squeezed as much information as the aggregated data could give us, so I wandered off closer to the source to get deeper answers.

First I double-checked that what we were seeing in aggregate was what the data actually showed. Our main_summary dataset confirmed what we were seeing was not some weird artefact… but it also showed that there was no increase in client numbers:

A quick flip of the query and I learned that a single “client” was sending tens of thousands of pings each and every day from a long-dead non-release build of Firefox Developer Edition.

A “client” in this case is identified by “client_id”, a unique identifier that lives in a Firefox profile. Generally we take a single “client” to roughly equal a single “user”, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes a single user may have multiple profiles (one at work, one at home, for instance). Sometimes multiple users may have the same profile (an enterprise may provision a specific Firefox profile to every terminal).

It seemed likely we were in the second case: one profile, many Firefox installs.

But could we be sure? What could we learn about the “client” sending us this unexpectedly-large amount of data?

This single client began sending a few pings around November 15, 2016. This makes sense, as Aurora 51 was still the latest version at that time. Things didn’t ramp up until December when we started seeing over ten thousand pings per day. After a lull during Christmas it settled into what appeared to be some light growth with a large peak on Feb 17 reaching one hundred thousand pings on just that day.

This is kinda weird. If we assume some rule-of-thumb of say, two pings per user per day, then we’re talking fifty thousand users running this ancient version of Aurora. What are they doing with it?

But we do know for how long the browser session lasted (from Firefox start to Firefox shutdown), so let’s take a look at that:

Woah. Over half of the sessions reported by the pings were exactly 215 seconds long. Two minutes and 35 seconds.

It gets weirder. It turns out that these Aurora 51 builds are all running on the same Operating System (Windows XP, about which I’ve blogged before), all have the same addon installed (Random Agent Spoofer, though about 10% also have Alexa Traffic Rank), none have Aurora 51 set to be their default browser, none have application updates enabled, and they come from 418 different geographical locations according to the IP address of the submitters (top 10 locations include 5 in the US, 2 in France, 2 in Britain, and one in Germany).

Everyone mentioned here and some others besides have thrown their heads at this mystery and can’t come up with anything suitably satisfying. Is it a Windows XP VM that is distributed to help developers test their websites? Is it an embedded browser in some popular piece of software with broad geographic appeal? Is someone just spoofing us by setting their client ids the same? If so, how did they spoof their session lengths?

To me the two-minute-and-thirty-five-second length of sessions just screams that this is some sort of automated process. I’m worried that Firefox might have been packaged into some sort of botnet-type-thingy that has gone out and infected thousands of hosts and is using our robust network stack to… to do what?

And then there’s the problem of what to do about it.

On one hand, this is data from Firefox. It arrived properly-formed, and no one’s trying to attack us with it, so we have no need to stop it entering our data pipeline for processing.

On the other hand, this data is making the Aurora tab spinner graph look wonky for :mconley, and might cause other mischief down the line.

It leads us to question whether we care about data that’s been sent to use by automated processes… and whether we could identify such data if we didn’t.

For now we’re going to block this particular client_id’s data from entering the aggregate dataset. The aggregate dataset is used by telemetry.mozilla.org to display interesting stuff about Firefox users. Human users. So we’re okay with blocking it.

But all Firefox users submit data that might be useful to us, so what we’re not going to do is block this problematic client’s data from entering the pipeline. We’ll continue to collect and collate it in the hopes that it can reveal to us some way to improve Firefox or data collection in the future.

And that’s sadly where we’re at with this: an unsolved mystery, some unanswered questions about the value of automated data, and an unsatisfied sense of curiosity.

Last I reported, the future of Firefox’s Windows XP support was uncertain, even given long-standing plans for its removal.

With the filing of bug 1305453 and the commensurate discussion on firefox-dev, things are now much more certain. Firefox will (pending approval) be ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista in Firefox 53 (scheduled release date: April 18, 2017).

Well, thanks for tuning in. I guess I can wrap up these posts and…

Okay, yes, you’re right. It isn’t that simple.

First, the actual day that Windows XP and Windows Vista users will cease getting Firefox updates is actually much later than April of 2017. Instead, those users will continue to receive security updates until April of 2018 because the version of Firefox 52 they’ll be getting is an Extended Support Release.

What is Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR)? It’s a version of Firefox for enterprises and other risk-averse users that receives security (and only security) updates for one year after initial release. This allows these change-weary users to still chose Firefox without having to consider how to support a major version release every six-to-eight weeks.

Windows XP and Vista users will be shunted from the normal roughly-six-weeks-per-version “Release” channel to the “ESR” channel for 52. New installs on Windows XP and Vista at that time will also be for ESR 52. This should ensure that our decreasing Windows XP+Vista userbase will be supported until they’ve finished diminishing into…

…well, okay that’s not simple either. In absolute terms, our Windows XP userbase has actually increased over the past six months or so. Some if not all of this is the end of the well-documented slump we see in user population over the Northern-hemisphere Summer (we’re now coming back up to Fall-Winter-Spring numbers). It is also possible that we’ve seen some ex-Chrome users fleeing Google’s drop of support from earlier this year.

Deseasonalized numbers for just WinXP users are hard to come by, so this is fairly speculative. One thing that’s for certain is that the diminishing Windows XP userbase trend I had previously observed (and was counting on seeing continue) is no longer in evidence.

So what happens if we reach April of 2018 and we still have millions and millions of Windows XP users still relying on Firefox to provide them with a safe way to navigate the increasingly-hostile environment of the Web?

No idea. I guess this means I’ll be continuing to blog about WinXP for a couple years yet.

All three of these versions are no longer supported by Apple. Mozilla strongly encourages our users to upgrade to a version of OS X currently supported by Apple. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates, have known exploits, and are dangerous for you to use.

You could apply that just as easily and even more acutely to Windows XP.

But, then, why isn’t Mozilla ending support for XP in a similar announcement? Essentially it is because Windows XP is still too popular amongst Firefox users. The Windows XP Firefox population still outnumbers the Mac OSX (all versions) and Linux populations combined.

My best guess is that we’ll be able to place the remaining Windows XP Firefox users on ESR 52 which should keep the last stragglers supported into 2018. That is, if the numbers don’t suddenly decrease enough that we’re able to drop support completely before then, shuffling the users onto ESR 45 instead.

What’s nice is the positive-sounding emails at the end of the thread announcing the gains in testing infrastructure and the near-term removal of code that supported now-unused build configurations. The cost of supporting these platforms is non-0, and gains can be realized immediately after dropping support.

ICU Planning to Drop Support for Windows XP

A key internationalization library in use by Firefox, ICU, is looking to drop Windows XP support in their next version. The long-form discussion is on dev-platform (you might want to skim the unfortunate acrimony over Firefox for Android (Fennec) present in that thread) but it boils down to: do we continue shipping old software to support Windows XP? For how long? Is this the straw that will finally break WinXP support’s back?

Dropping the XP support is *completely* not an engineering decision. It isn’t even a community decision. It is completely, 100% MoCo driven Firefox product management decision, as long as the numbers of users are where they are.

On the plus side, ICU seems to be amenable to keep Windows XP support for a little longer if we need it… but we really ought to have a firm end-of-life date for the platform if we’re to make that argument in a compelling fashion. At present we don’t have (or at least haven’t communicated) such a date. ICU may just march on without us if we don’t decide on one.

For now I will just keep an eye on the numbers. Expect a post when the Windows XP numbers finally dip below the Linux+OSX as that will be a huge psychological barrier broken.